How Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Is Making Flickr Awesome Again

With all the hubbub around Marissa Mayer squashing telecommuters and making controversial remarks about feminism, an important story about the Yahoo CEO has been overlooked: She’s making Flickr awesome again.

Flickr, launched in 2004 by Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, was one of the web’s brightest stars for years. Before Facebook, before Instagram, before Twitter, the online masses used Flickr to share their lives with the world. By late 2010, there were 5 billion photos hosted on Flickr. Instagram hadn’t even launched.Flickr's growth rate leveled off after 2008.
A year later, mobile phone photography had fully taken hold, causing digital picture sharing to positively explode. Flickr announced its 6 billionth upload. An impressive number, but by then people were uploading that many images to Facebook every month. Unfortunately for Flickr, the vast majority of photo sharing was now happening elsewhere. Even “serious” photographers (i.e., the kind who avoid Facebook like a cheap disposable camera) began abandoning Flickr for sites like 500px.

Flickr floundered because parent company Yahoo (which purchased Flickr in 2005) rerouted the site’s engineering resources, focusing them on solving the wrong problems. Mobile and social innovation—in other words, the stuff that drove almost all of the growth on other photo sharing platforms—essentially dried up. Traffic dwindled as Flickr’s once top-notch features began to feel more and more archaic to users.

When Mayer took over as Yahoo CEO in mid-2012, loyal Flickr fans saw an opportunity to shine a light on the site’s problems. Entrepreneur Sean Bonner launched #dearmarissamayer, a Twitter campaign that pointed to a website with a simple request: “Dear Marissa Mayer, please make Flickr awesome again!” The campaign went viral. Yahoo took note, responding with a matching site asking the public to “help us make Flickr awesomer” (with a link to its job listings).

Under Mayer, Flickr is indeed becoming awesomer. There are the little things, like the recent integration of Flickr photos in Yahoo image search results. But most important is the December release of Flickr’s overhauled iPhone app. It’s terrific, complete with powerful and easy-to-use photo editing features, as well as a host of social and mobile sharing tools that address how people actually use the Internet in 2013.

Things are looking good for Flickr. With the launch of the rebooted mobile app, the site’s monthly traffic went up significantly. Even Flickr’s harshest critics are coming around. “The iOS app is brilliant,” Bonner says. “It’s got me and a lot of my friends using our old dormant Flickr accounts again.” It’s nice to have you back, Flickr.